TechBits

Spring Cleaning For Your SCLS Email Accounts

Have you ever looked at your library's email address listing on the SCLS Email Address Directory webpage, to make sure it is up-to-date?  If not, then take a quick look and see what needs to be changed.  This is important as other SCLS libraries may be trying to contact one of your fellow employees that left the library months ago.

If you have a staff person in need of a change:

1. Did the person recently start at the library and need an email account?  If so, then please fill out the New E-mail Account Request online form.


2. Did the person transfer to another SCLS library?  If so, then please fill out the Request an E-mail Name, Title or Library Change online form.  This will move their listing from your library to their new library.


3. Did the person leave SCLS all together?  If so, then please fill out the E-mail Account Deletion online form.  Please note that this will NOT delete the email on the PC.  For that you will need to call me at the Help Desk.

Guest Post: Email Overload

This Guest Post is by Jean Anderson, Continuing Education Coordinator for SCLS and panda enthusiast!

At 4 am this morning I was pondering a technology question, “how do I manage my document files, and all those emails that I’ve saved from past discussion lists, and all those favorites,” especially the ones that no longer exist or I no longer need.  What a chunk of time I would have to invest to clean up my computer files.  Is there an easier way?

While preparing for a Googlicious Training program for Reedsburg earlier this year, Kerri brought this question to me. Many of the tools that I use can help with this question. I’ll try and help you with these issues in a series of posts over the next couple of months.

First I’ll deal with email. Back in 2009, I did a Brain Snack on email and presented some ideas for dealing with email overload. In addition to the recording, there are some links to articles and books that I still refer to.

I use Gmail and the tools that I’ll talk about focus on Gmail. Your email program may have similar options and tools. Making the best use of the tools we already use can do a lot towards improving  your productivity and efficiency.

I utilize labels (or folders) and filters to organize my email inbox.
If you subscribe to many email lists, filtering these into a separate folder or label so you can read them when you have time helps you be more efficient. Here’s an example of a filter that I use. I subscribe to publib but I don’t want those message to appear in my inbox (publib is a very active list!). I created a filter that looks for a subject heading of publib, applies the label publib, and skips the inbox. I   also use a Gmail feature called Show All if Unread (in Settings in the Labels tab). This feature will hide labels when there are no unread messages. This means that when there are new items in LearnRT, the label shows up in my sidebar indicating I should read them. After reading them, the label disappears from my sidebar.

With Gmail, I don’t worry about the size of my mailbox. I archive messages that I think I may need to reference in the future. With Gmail, I can easily search and retrieve any needed messages.

If you need to clean out your mailbox periodically, here’s what I did before I moved from Eudora to Thunderbird (and Gmail). I set aside 20-30 minutes a day and worked through all my folders. As I went through them, I saved some messages, deleted others, and also thought about my organizational scheme for my new email program. This is also a good year end or new year project.

For more info about filters in Thunderbird, check out Brian's post: "Thunderbird Email Filters."
For general tips on dealing with "email overload", try Jean's Brain Snack on email and/or this "11 Tips for Dealing with Email Overload" blog post.

Know where you're going

Kittens are cute bundles of almost boundless energy and curiosity.  But let’s face it, at that age their sense of self preservation isn’t usually well developed and they often leap into things without looking.  If something looks interesting, they’ll just go for it, without realizing that paper bag their about to jump on to reach the toy doesn’t actually have a top.  That’s what a lot of scammers are counting on as well.  That their link, attachment, email or web page look interesting and safe enough for you to use. 

Even if the web page or email looks “official”, it’s not an indication that it is legitimate.  Many scams that are trying to trick you into clicking on a link or entering your information go through the effort of trying to look official to encourage you to use them.  In just the past week, I’ve gotten scam emails supposedly from Twitter, Facebook and even the FDIC that copied the look and/or logos to try to trick me into thinking they were real.  Banks, credit cards and Facebook have been the target of more than one phony login page scam as well. 

Before you click on a link, it’s not a bad idea to check just where the link is going.  If you put your mouse cursor over a link—don’t click, just place the cursor over the link—you’ll see the real address.  In Thunderbird, Firefox and Internet Explorer it’s in the lower left hand corner of the window.  So if you’ve got any doubts about a link, take a few seconds to check where it says it's going.

Example of the fake Twitter email:

If you look in the lower left hand corner, you'll see the URL isn't even close to a URL you'd expect to see from Twitter. 

Out of sight, out of mind

All my life, I’ve had a “junk drawer” for those odds and ends that didn’t really go anywhere else or I didn’t want to deal with right then.  Since I didn’t have to look at them, the contents usually got ignored for a good long time before I’d sort trash from treasure.  Now I’ve also got a junk email folder.  While the contents of the folder and the drawer are quite a bit different, every so often I still need to go through that folder and see if there’s any treasure among all that trash.

As tempting as it is to leave your junk email folder as “out of sight, out of mind”, it is actually something you should look at occasionally to make sure nothing that you actually want ends up there.  Thunderbird, along with almost every other email program, has the ability to “learn” what you consider to be junk mail.  This is usually a really good thing since, after a bit of training, the amount of junk mail you see goes down.  But junk mail filters occasionally make mistakes and, if you don’t correct these mistakes, they “learn” the wrong things.

The recommendation for email with any sort of “learning” junk filter is to check the junk folder often when you first start using it.  And if you’re expecting an email that’s not shown up or if someone says they sent you an email and you’ve not seen it, it’s a good idea to check the junk folder.  As time goes on, you junk filter “learns” about your email and you should see fewer mislabeled genuine email messages so you can check the junk folder less frequently.  As far as how often you should go through and clean out the folder, a lot depends on how much junk mail you get and how much time you can stand to spend going through the junk.  I’d recommend at least once a month since some email programs delete anything marked junk that’s older than a month. 

Taking out the trash in Thunderbird

 

Does your Thunderbird trash contain a lot of old, unwanted emails?  Do you wish there was an easy to "take out the trash" in Thunderbird?  Well, there is, and it's easy to setup.

1. Open your Thunderbird account
2. Go to Tools...Account Settings
3. Click on Server Settings
4. Click the checkbox next to "Empty Trash on Exit", unless it's already checked
5. Click the OK button

Now whenever you delete an email it goes to your trash and when you exit Thunderbird all of your trash is automatically deleted.  WARNING!!!  Do NOT do this if you use Trash as a holding area or if you think you may need to get back a previously deleted email.  Once the trash is emptied it is gone for good with no way to get it back.

Changing your SCLS Email Address

Recently there was someone who wanted a different SCLS email address but thought they were permanently stuck with the old one.  Actually, they’re not and neither are you. 

If your name changes or you are one of the people using a shortened version of your name from earlier account name limits, you can request an email account name change.  Now if your first thought was “what a great way to get rid of my junk mail”, know that this won’t fix any junk mail problem you might be having.  In fact, we forward everything addressed to your old account to your new one so changing your email account isn’t going to help at all. 

1. Go to the “Request an E-mail Name, Title or Library Change” form at http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/2805 (Yes, it’s a long name, but the form is used for other related changes as well.)
2. Fill out the sections on “What is your old SCLS email address?” and “What would you like your new email address to be?”. 
3. If your name changed, also fill in the "If you want to change the display name..." section to let us know how your name should appear in the email directory.
4. Enter your name in the last field and submit the form.
5. To make sure no email is accidentally lost, we’ll contact you to set up a time to do the switch.  
6. Once the switch is made, a few settings in Thunderbird have to be updated and you should let people you deal with know your new address.  You should also update your email list subscriptions.  That’s all there is to it!

For more SCLS email options see the Email and Email List Services page at http://www.scls.info/technology/email/

Odds and Ends

I've run across some interesting services, sites, and ideas recently that I can't really review (as I haven't used them myself), but which might be worth a mention.

Email lists.  Have a large group of people that you need to email on a regular basis?  MailChimp is a tool to manage email lists, reviewed here by Mark Stout's "Family Tech" column.

Online event registration.  EventBrite and Brown Paper Tickets are online services for managing event registration, reviewed here by TechSoup (along with several other services). Both services are free for free events.

WI Voter info.  You probably knew about this already, but I just ran across it. Look up voter registration and polling place location, look up polling place location for an address, or check Provisional vote status at the The State of Wisconsin Voter Public Access site. 

Library as virtual supermarket.  This library serves as a pickup location for groceries as well as books (probably nothing your library will implement, but an interesting idea!)  http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bal-md.hs.supermarket18mar18,0,3878327.story

Photo credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/highfiredanger/4263846702/

Spot the Fake

One of the problems with identifying fraudulent email is there isn’t one “sure” way to know.  There are a lot of different clues to use to decide if you think an email is a fake. 

One of the surest indicators can be the true address of any links in the email.  If the link visibly isn’t the official website, like an email supposedly from “Investment Company” has a link that says http://bixszceary.pke.pl/signin.exe, it’s pretty easy to tell the email is a fake.  But what a link says in the email may not be where it’s actually going.   

In many email programs, if you put your mouse cursor over a link—don’t click, just place the cursor over the link—you’ll see the real address.  In Thunderbird it’s in the lower left hand corner of the window.  So if the link in the email says "http://www.investmentco.com/signin.php", but you hover the mouse cursor over the link and see "http://www.srmt.investmentco.com.wixsrt.com/signin.php" in the lower corner you know this isn’t legitimate.  Even though “investmentco.com” appears in the address, since there is more after “investmentco.com” but before the / means that’s not where the link is going.   It’s the last bit of the address before the / that determines where the link is actually going.  This link actually goes to “wixsrt.com”.  

Another quick and easy test is if the email is supposedly from a business/bank/organization you don’t deal with.  Back a few months ago I received a rather professional looking email supposedly from an investment firm telling me about a problem with my account.  But it’s a company I’ve never dealt with in my life so that was a mark in the fake column.

Third, if the email asks for personal or account information, put a mark in the fake column.  For the most part, legitimate emails don’t ask for account or personal details.  Most companies have realized this isn’t a good idea. 

Another clue can be in the To: and From: addresses.  If the address in the To: field isn’t your email address and/or the address in the From: field doesn’t fit the supposed sender of the email, like an email supposedly from Microsoft having george@georgesbaitshop.com as the sender, it’s a mark in the fake tally.  If the address in To: and From: are the same, it’s another mark under fake.  On the flip side however, having your email address in To: and legitimate looking address in From: is not actually a point in the legit column. 

General rule: If you think an email is legitimate, but you’re not certain, give the company in question a call or log onto your account on their website using an address or phone number you already have for them.  Do not use any of the links or phone numbers from the email. 

How to fix Thunderbird when it opens the wrong account

 
Have you ever run into this problem?  You go to a staff PC that has multiple Thunderbird email accounts on it and you try to open your email, but someone else's email opens instead of yours!  You try other email accounts and it always opens the same person's email.

Well, I've had calls about this problem from a lot of people, so I thought it would be a good TechBits topic.  The cause of this problem, I'm guessing, is an improperly closed out email account.  To fix this problem open up the email account that always opens.  Then click on the File menu and then click on Exit.  Now when you try to open your email account it should open like it normally does.

Gone (email) phishing

Do you know how to tell when an email is legitimate and when it's fake and phishing for your personal information?

I ran across a quiz today that tests your "Phishing IQ". When you're finished, you'll get a score along with an explanation of why the email in a question was phishing or legitimate. Some of the 10 questions were tougher than I expected, and I'll admit -- I wasn't sure how to answer two of them.

Good luck on the quiz! And here are some good recommendations when it comes to email and phishing, courtesy of Sophos.